Saturday, 19 May 2012

In Prague this week I'd hoped for warm spring weather as a break from the unrelieved awfulness that has been English weather for the last eternity. No such luck - I hit the week it all went chilly there too.Here for a conference, my days were mostly tied up - annoying how work can get in the way of more interesting pursuits like exploring or shopping.

Freed up in the evenings, with light until late, the tourists that throng the Charles Bridge and Old Town in large groups during the day seemed to have magically disappeared - sucked into restaurants and hotels? - and many parts of the city were strangely quiet and deserted. Where were the locals?

In the park on Kampa Island I saw a few Praguers walking their dogs ...

the only sounds coming from a group of students quietly playing guitars on the grass ...

the park benches empty, where you might sit and contemplate the nearly 700 years of history that this stone bridge (the Charles) has seen ...

The park on the bank of the Vitava river is also home to a museum (the Kampa) of central European modern art that I'd heard was worth visiting ...

though these were a bit of a surprise ...

The giant crawling babies are probably the tamest of Czech sculptor David Cerny's wacky creations. More of these slightly creepy faceless babies also crawl up the sides of Prague's television tower, and for his other weird installations see here

On the other side of the museum, Magdalena Jetelova's giant chair perches precariously on a low, narrow wall in the Vitava - a little precariously perhaps, since this is a replica of the original chair that washed away when the river flooded in 2002.

and nearby a line of neon-yellow penguins (made of recycled plastic bottles by the Italian Cracking Art Group) marched along luminously ...

Just the start of many visual contrasts I saw in this beautiful city ...